Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Welcome Christmas.

IN THE SPIRIT. So Mrs.
CP and I are at an impasse. We got snowed in. Big time. We managed to
get the gifts for everyone else but not for each other. We were
planning low-cost stocking stuffers, some kind of brilliant spending of
$20 apiece. You know. Tough economy and all. Then Mother Nature weighed
in:

But barring some last-minute desperation buying spree, we're not going
to have gifts for each other. So our backup plan is learning the words
to the Whoville Christmas song "Welcome Christmas." Which we'll sing,
badly, to each other on Christmas morning.

Things could be a lot worse. And we're also going to New York City over
the holidays. Which is pretty much as good as it gets. Merry Christmas.

posted at
2:03 pm
by
CountryPunk

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

The Split. And Why It
Matters.

THE
WISDOM OF (PLUMP, CUTE) BABES. Sometimes, politics and religion
converge. That's what's happening with me now, and I'm not handling it well. Let's set the
scene. Here's a NYT essay by the new enfant terrible of the
conservative elitist class, Ross
Douthat. I apologize for pushing the 'fair usage' practice by
borrowing the whole thing, but my defense is that in this case 'the
whole thing' is nothing more than the posing of an incredibly important
question:

Heaven
and Nature

It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at
Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic
is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply
felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all
blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long
apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and
calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the
blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic
existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human
invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine,
but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,”
described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every
living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has
been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the
truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves.
It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King”
and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose
mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy
together.”

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans
respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the
“religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded
with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on
how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed
Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and
mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.

As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in
the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s,
leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not
content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a
creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand
and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one
great whole.”

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal.
We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is
an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society.
The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature
qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a
rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for
people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic
religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their
virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek
Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps
“bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of
recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence
but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human
affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can
support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He
means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End
of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from
immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert
Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of
the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response.
Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is
good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering
and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is
really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest
to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond
imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish
and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid
these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half
outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with
ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no
God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it —
a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an
abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the
natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

I don't mean to demean Douthat. Putting the right question is a
spectacular feat if you can do it in a single op-ed column. Answering
that question is everyone's individual responsibility, not Douthat's.
His last four paragraphs frame an existential crisis for anyone who's
paying attention. For those of us who have significant parts of our
personal identities bound up with our citizenship as Americans, the
current political situation is also an existential crisis.

Have you wondered why your response to the Obama administration is so
severe that it impinges on your personal life? This is why. For me, I
must admit, it has amounted to panic. Because I know what is at stake.

Call it a perfect storm of assaults on faith. I cannot do the things,
physically, I once did. When I shoveled snow the other day, I thought I
was going to die. For real. I hid it from my wife but the dogs were
concerned. They surged around me as I sat gasping for breath. I pushed
them away. I push everyone away. Even my wife and closest friends. Especially my wife and closest
friends.

Yes, I had the mid-life crisis the MSM convinced me I would experience.
Back when I turned forty. But that pales in comparison to the
end-of-life crisis you experience when you confront the fact that you
are growing old and, worse than that, frail. It's easy to beat a
mid-life crisis. You buy a Harley. It's not so easy to beat the
end-of-life crisis. You look to philosophy, religion, family, country,
humanity itself for a context that makes sense of your life and its
inevitable approaching end.

For many, family is enough. Which is good. If you have it, embed
yourself in it. It is its own kind of salvation. But some of us
don't. Some of us have only the illusion of family, blood relations of
spouses whom we love fiercely but know to a certainty regard us as bit
players on the stage of births, baptisms, Thanksgivings and other
holiday dramas. There will be attendees at our funerals, but only
because they are honoring someone else they care about more.

Which is fine. The way of things. There are other relationships. I have
had a life-long relationship with God, specifically Jesus Christ. I
thought it was a unique relationship. I thought if I did His work, in
my own particular way, He would wink at my manifold sins. But my sins
are still sins. And I also thought, for way too many years, that my not
quite believing in Him was
somehow (roughly) analogous to Him not expressly condemning me. Talk about
your hubris.

But I am still a Christian. If not blindly at least philosophically,
historically, and ritually. And I'm an American. These two, however
qualified, used to be more or less synonymous. I was also a rational
being, convinced that being part of the Long March Toward a Better Life
Through Science and Other Forms of Educated Thinking would count for
something at the, uh, end. You see, I also knew that being a Christian
meant that you were also a participant in the LMTBLTSOFET that bound me
up with the brotherhood of American exceptionalism.

But here, toward the end of my life, I have become, suddenly, a pariah.
Friends turned on me for things I said here. I needed my country to
sustain me in my beliefs. I knew that the Christianity-based U.S.
Constitution had been a force for good in the world, which was part of
my faith, such as it was, in the gospels. Have I mentioned the word
'frail'? I needed my country to bolster my religious faith.

And then came Obama. Not his fault, I guess. Back in 1999 I heard my
own dad tell me, in the full knowledge of his own imminent death from
cancer, that the country he had fought for no longer existed. Those of
you who have read this blog all these years know that I rejected his
angry, dying dismissal. Still do. BUT...

Even he never anticipated
that a president of the United States would take the position that
human existence was somehow wrong in the scheme of things. Which, no
matter how you boil it down, is the position -- nihilist in the extreme
-- of the supposed savants of western civilization. Note that the
Chinese exhibit no such enlightenment. That's why they'll own the 21st
century. Problem is, I don't want China to own any century. Especially
one I'm living or dying in. Which means it's time for me to die. And
I'm having trouble with that idea. My wife saved me from dying. Now she
can't understand why a mere Obama is undoing her good work. She blames
me. All I can do is
apologize. And try to explain that it's bigger than anything she or I
can control.

The Split. Yeah. Have you ever had the feeling that people are arguing
about matters YOU settled long ago? I
do. Every day. (Book of Andrew, Book of ASSUMPTIONS.) What is with
this idiotic notion that Nature is good and Mankind is bad? Fact is,
Nature is cruel, even demonstrably vicious, and Mankind is, uh, more kind than not. That's why Mankind
has prospered and proliferated. DUH. Consider this: Christianity is the
biggest ever departure from Nature. Its central premise is that we all matter. Odd. Wrong? Perhaps.
But absolutely right in human terms. It has led to the extension of
human thought, lifespans, and a kind of beauty and accomplishment no
other culture has ever dreamed of. No other kind of human philosophy
has produced such sheer gorgeousness. Now we are being asked to regard
ourselves as vile, a scientifically verifiable pollution on the face of
the earth, something akin to the AIDS virus. The President of the
United States subscribes to this view. Let me repeat that. The President of the United States
subscribes to this view.

While I am struggling on
matters of faith, patriotism, and survival. My response? Fuck him and
the horse he rode in on. The Split does
matter. Not just because I'm going to die, but because we all know we're going to die
and we all still care about what happens after Human
religion is by definition
the Split with Nature, the
proof that we are better than lions, hyenas, wolves, and black mambas.
Most of us
live every day with the proof -- the species that remade themselves
just for the privilege of living with us and acquired a moral sense
along the way -- dogs. Now we're on the "precipice" of taking better
care of our dogs than ourselves. It's called ObamaCare.

Obama has made me a monster. I confess it. I thought I was part of a
national tradition that would move from strength to strength regardless
of my own personal failings. I was wrong. I thought Jesus Christ was
strong enough to withstand both the dashboard totemism of the
fundamentalists and the politically correct nonsense of the Catholics
and Episcopalians. I was wrong. I thought I could soldier through my
doubts and fears -- Obama's deliberate assault on my country and its
freedoms -- without anyone knowing the depths of my despair. I was
wrong.

But -- and here's where I appeal to my brethren -- how do you explain
to loved ones that "mere" politics can be the driver of your distance
from "Christmas spirit" and threaten everyone else's enjoyment of the
season?

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not blaming it on Obama.
I'm talking about my own loss of family and lack of faith. I have
failed in every way possible. The Obama adminstration found all those
cracks and turned them into the personal disaster I now face.

I AM sorry. I am also, truly, in despair. I love my wife, I love my
(her) family, I love my country, and I'm not serving any of them at the
moment. That's the definition of my despair.

UPDATE.
Thanks to Eduardo. Psalm 31:

10 For my life is spent with
grief,

and my years with sighing:
my strength faileth because of mine iniquity,
and my bones are consumed.
11 I was a reproach among all mine
enemies,

but especially among my neighbors,
and a fear to mine acquaintance:
they that did see me without fled from me.

12 I am forgotten as a dead man out of
mind:

I am like a broken vessel.
13 For I have heard the slander of
many:
fear was on every side:
while they took counsel together

Thanks to others, too. It does all matter...

posted at
11:46 am
by
InstaPunk

The Future

DEE-TROIT.
I actually know this city. Had a car stolen there once.
(An SUV I didn't want but had to buy because I was a GM consultant and
they hated my MR2.) While I was working as a consultant to the -- wait
for it -- UAW. Who didn't want to hear
it. How to not kill the industry they were sucking the life out of,
that is. Things like not
beating the crap out of auto workers who took jobs with Japanese
companies in America. Or keying their cars in their driveways, at home.
Didn't. Want. To. Hear. It.

But. Here's your future under the Obama administration. Just imagine
health care Detroit style. Lots of money flying around and death at
every turn. HUH! (Does this git me a Peace
Prize?)

I'm working on the Christmas spirit thing, though. My friend Chain Gang
made it simple enough that even I can understand it. He pointed out
that nobody ever believed all
of Jeremiah's correct predictions. Am I as good as Jeremiah? No. So cut
it out during the Christmas season, okay? Save the gloom and doom for
the New Year, okay?

Monday, December 21, 2009

.
There is actually an
InstaPunk-certified movie reviewer. Since we don't always see movies
the moment they come out, where are you supposed to turn? Well, Kurt
Loder would be the guy.

Not that we always agree. He liked Watchmen,
for example, which we didn't, not at all and by a whole lot. BUT.
Here's what you get with Loder. He knows his movies, the whole history
and all the references and antecedents. His reviews are literate but
column length. He takes movies on their own terms, which is to say that
he doesn't expect a Pixar movie to be an Ingemar Bergmann film, even
though he knows Bergmann inside out. Nor can you wow him with sheer
money, celebrity, or hype (He worked for MTV, don't forget.) He's also
a good enough writer and reporter that he tells you why he liked, or didn't, a movie,
in ways specific enough for you to decide whether his opinion is
relevant to you or not.

Finally, I have found him to be the best of all reviewers at confirming
my own viewing of a movie I've actually seen. He sees what's good about
it, what's bad about it, and he almost never spoils it with his review.

Imagine my surprise to discover that he grew up less than fifty miles
from me, is a libertarian, and employs his experience with saltwater as
a source of philosophical wisdom:

I grew up on the Jersey Shore, on a
little barrier island. The Atlantic Ocean was on one side, the bay was
on the other. Everyone there hunted and fished and clammed and got
crabs out of the bay. And one day my brother told me someone had come
down from the Bureau of Petty Harassment or something and they measured
the temperature of the water and had decided it was a little too warm
and a certain type of bacteria might incubate in it and there was a
chance that might harm the clams. And so, from now on, no one was
supposed to take clams out of the bay anymore. Which everyone ignored.
And no one died. That was before the government got tenacious about
this stuff. So I thought that was pretty stupid right there

I know exactly what he's talking about. But I didn't know it when I
discovered his reviews. I
thought he was the pseudo-intellectual of
MTV. I was wrong. Fortunately, I found I was wrong by reading his
writing, not his biography. Now I am happy to report I've located his review page on the
Internet, thanks to Big Hollywood. I commend you to do the same. Here's
a sample of his review of Avatar:

There's a lot to look at here: the
luminescent glow of the jungle in which the Na'vi live, the ancient
Tree of Souls with which they commune, a spectacular range of mountains
hanging high in the sky up above Pandora — and there's a lot going on.
The director and his battalion of digital technicians have cooked up a
fantastical bestiary of Pandoran creatures — futuristic hammerhead
rhinos; dogfighting battle dragons; and, in one virtuoso sequence, a
vicious six-legged thingy that chases Jake through the jungle and off
the edge of a cliff (see trailer). The meticulous detail in which these
creatures have been rendered, and the complexity with which they're
arrayed in the film's exotic environments, are undeniable marvels of
moviemaking art.

Unfortunately, whenever the action lets up and we're returned to the
piddling story, the picture slumps like a failed soufflé. It's
also heavily laced with political instruction of a most familiar sort.
Cameron, who's now 55, is a self-acknowledged aging hippie, and his
boomer worldview is strictly by-the-numbers. Quaritch and Selfridge are
evil Americans despoiling the Na'vi's idyllic planet in exactly the
same way that the humans have (we're told) trashed their own native
orb. The invaders are armed with deplorable corporate technology (an
odd animosity in a major-studio movie that reportedly cost more than
$300 million to make), and they speak the familiar — and here rather
anachronistic — language of contemporary American warmongering. ("We
will fight terror with terror!" "It's some kind of shock-and-awe
campaign!")

The Na'vi, on the other hand, with their bows and arrows and long
braided hair, are stand-ins for every spiritually astute and
ecologically conscientious indigenous population ever ground down under
the heel of rampaging Western imperialism. They appear to have no
warlike impulses themselves, and they live in complete harmony with
their environment. (They even talk to trees.) Why, the movie asks, as
if the question were new, can't we be more like them?

You see? He's not as political as I am. He doesn't get as pissed about
ideology as I do. But he still knows that a superficial crap script is
bad moviemaking.

I know more than that. But in the interim, Kurt Loder will do. And when
he likes a movie you probably wouldn't, he gives you enough
information about his own viewpoint and arguments to let you decide for
yourself. What more could you ask than that?

posted at
1:54 am
by
CountryPunk

Friday, December 18, 2009

Purely from a political standpoint,
this should be a time for celebration – watching the worst political
leadership combine in modern, perhaps in all American history joining
hands and leaping off the President’s “precipice.” If ever there was a time for “the worse,
the better” rightwing Leninism, this may be it. Or, for those
who prefer their references more pop culture-y, there’s always Dirty
Harry (if it was good enough for Ronald Reagan, it’s good enough for
me)...

Allahpundit ties together several
strands, then sums things up succinctly in a message to the Dems (if
not quite as succinctly as Massachusetts Dem Michael Capuano): “Good
luck in those midterms, champ.” William Kristol, whose idea inspired
the earlier post on politically sane alternatives, provides a political
play call – noting that Obamacare’s three main beneficiaries are Big
Pharma, Big Government, and Big Insurance, while urging the Republicans
to argue “1,000 times no”...

Insert quote from Jay Cost pointing out that these Big Three
beneficiaries are ideal for any politician to run against. Next:

If these gentlemen are right, we can
stop calling it Obamacare, Pelosicare, Reidcare, Idon’tcare,
Whatevercare: The day it passes
it will be Zombiecare.

The fiscal and perhaps other reckonings to come will likely require
much more from us and our political system than merely avoiding the
Obamacrats’ mistakes, but they have provided the negative blueprint for
how to proceed to that hard business, and much of the material for
construction – even if the Dems do themselves a favor and scrap this
bill at the 11th hour. Do the systematic opposite of what they’ve been
doing. That template may serve
conservatives for a generation. [boldface added]

Social conservatives, fiscal
conservatives, the GOP leadership, Sarah Palin’s heartland supporters,
conservative think-tank intellectuals, D.C. and Manhattan
conservatives, Big Business and small-business conservatives, Joe the
Plumber conservatives, and every stripe and flavor of conservative in
between are all united against the Democrats’ proposed government
takeover of health care. All.

It’s the Left, not the Right, cracking up. It’s the party donkey, not
the elephant, now in a rabies-crazed frenzy...

House Democrats are blaming Senate Democrats and the White House for
the legislative meltdown. The Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief himself
has come under fire. Democrat Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin carped that
“the Obama administration is sitting on the sidelines.” Democrat Rep.
John Conyers of Michigan accused the White House of selling out to the
insurance industry.

It all feels very 1990s – the period between 1992 and 1994,
specifically – when liberals smugly declared the premature death of the
GOP only to be walloped by the midterm conservative backlash. The
ruling majority got greedy, overreached, and lost touch with average
Americans. With the support of the public, Republicans united to slay
Bill Clinton’s stimulus monstrosity and Hillary Clinton’s health care
monstrosity...

One major difference now is the vast proliferation of alternative media
– through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Fox News – that has facilitated
the spread of information about Democrats’ big government designs and
given rise to Tea Party activism. The Right’s ability to change the
narrative is greater than ever. The Democrat crack-up reminds us that
there are no fait accomplis in politics. Political coroners, take heed.

I don't object to some modest optimism. We all need to believe that
defeat can be turned eventually into some kind of victory. But I just
want to sound a strong cautionary note. The notion that "If ever there
was a time for 'the worse, the better' rightwing Leninism, this may be
it" is absolutely dead wrong.
No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

It's sheer giddiness to think that it's somehow better for
conservatives if the Democrats succeed in passing this truly horrendous
healthcare bill. Madness, in fact. Yes, the Dems will experience
huge losses at the polls in 2010, but even the rosiest of all
possible electoral scenarios is nowhere near rosy enough to undo the
damage the bill would cause. The Republicans could retake the House,
but not by the majority the Democrats presently hold. It's less likely,
though remotely possible, that Republicans could retake the Senate.
However, there's no way on earth the Republicans could command the
60-40 majority that has made possible the currently imminent hijacking
of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Which means that there's no way to
get to the magic number that would be required for repeal.

That's why Democrats in the House and
Senate are prepared to commit political suicide to pass this bill in
the first place. If any
bill passes, the federal bureaucracy will permanently control a huge new
chunk of our lives and liberties.

Think about that. Some damage control could be accomplished certainly.
Fearful Democrats might be bludgeoned into passing new legislation that
would effect tort reform, undo the federal funding of abortion,
eliminate some of the excesses of taxation, Medicare cuts/rationing,
and add some much needed oversight on bureaucratic tinkering with the
doctor-patient relationship. But the sea change in the nature of
healthcare decisionmaking will stand. The federal government will
remain the central power in determining what constitutes acceptable
health insurance and what medical treatment and procurement policies
will govern the behaviors of doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and
insurance plans. That's not just the camel's nose under the tent; it's
the whole camel. Costs will rise the way they always do under
government control, and the quality of service will decline in the way
we're all used to when the government is involved -- e.g., the Post
Office, the DMV, and those federal professionals who handle airport
security checks. Profit will be steadily driven out of the healthcare
marketplace and with it the innovations that have made this country the
worldwide leader in the advance of medical technology.

This not a time to feign
outrage at the monstrous bill rocketing toward corrupt, extorted
passage in the congress and then wink
at each other when the Democrats cripple their own electoral prospects
by jamming it down our throats as the law of the land. If they pass
this bill, they win a giant victory and all of us, the citizens of the
United States, are the losers. Our lives will be shorter, less free,
more embroiled in paperwork and red tape, and both more expensive and
infinitely more humiliating and oppressed.

I can't conceive of any November 2010 electoral outcome that can
compensate for such catastrophic real world results.

Can you?

This is not the time to crow, or gloat, or wink, or pat each other on
the back over Dem dissension and stupidity. It's time to redouble our
efforts to DEFEAT THIS TYRANNICAL TAKEOVER OF THE MOST PERSONAL PART OF
OUR INDIVIDUAL LIVES.

Screw the 2010 elections. Defeat this bill.

UPDATE.
CK MacLeod responds
to this post at Hotair.com. It's a well argued piece, and I don't
disagree in principle with most of his future tactical points, although
I have an overriding objection and a related dispute with his close:

If Obamacare, on its own terms or as
implicated in approaching fiscal catastrophe, remains anywhere near as
unpopular over the coming years as it is now, there is no fundamental
reason why it can’t be rescinded – piece by piece or all at once.
I therefore remain convinced that the proper response by conservatives
to its passage cannot and must not be despair – certainly not yet,
certainly not while a popular wave against the prime perpetrators is
rising, and not while the tools of democratic self-government are still
within reach.

I can see why Instapunk and others might feel justified in calling me
or anyone else out for unwarranted optimism as we stand on the Obamic
“precipice,” but in my opinion defeatism and pessimism are far worse
responses. This is a moment for sober judgment, and for
confidence in one’s own beliefs and analysis, whichever best keeps you
in the fight. It’s a moment to decide whether our message to the
Obamaist progressives is going to be: “You win -- we give up” or
“We’re coming after you, and getting rid of your laughable,
embarrassing, and repugnant health care bill (presuming you ever get
around to passing it) will just be the beginning.”

All I said was that we shouldn't treat passage of the bill as any kind
of good news. It isn't and wouldn't be. I detect that MacLeod is actually
agreeing with me on this point. I never suggested that if the bill were
passed, the appropriate conservative response should or would be, “You
win -- we give up.”

AFTER the fort has fallen, you immediately begin planning to retake the
fort. But when you are still defending the fort and the ramparts are
under fire, you don't grin knowingly at each other and say, "Boy are THEY in trouble if they dare conquer this fort!" Who in
his right mind of those engaged deeply in the fight would say that? You
could call it a timing issue. Yes, today Dunkirk is remembered for the
heroic, largely civilian response that rescued the core of the Brit
army from annhihilation at the hands of Hitler's troops early in World
War II, an extraordinary, almost miraculous turn of events that was
indispensable to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. But I very much
doubt that the outmanned troops trapped and facing capture or death at
Dunkirk winked at each other said, "Those Nazis have really stepped in
it this time. We've got'em right where we want'em."

It would have been infinitely
better if the British expeditionary force had defeated the Germans in
France instead. Dunkirk wouldn't have had to be an inspiring story. The
Battle of Britain might not have happened. The atrocious losses of the
American B-17 bomber groups who had to fight Germany from across the
channel wouldn't have been so atrocious. D-Day and its appalling
casualties wouldn't have been necessary at all. In reality, Dunkirk was
a military catastrophe, not a clever public relations coup for drumming
up mythic evidence of Hitler's doom.

I'm not beating up on MacLeod here. I can see that we don't differ much
at all on policy. My honest disagreement with him is that I think
we must fight the bill with every weapon in our arsenal until the
battle is finally and irreterievably lost. Then we immediately go to
work mounting the counterattack. He seems to think we must accept
our inevitable strategic defeat on the bill itself and buoy our spirits
with dreams of the vengeance to come. But if any of those dreams cause
us to fight a scintilla less hard against the imminent disaster of
passage, I am opposed. Even after the rescue from Dunkirk, there was no
guarantee that salvation of the Brit officer corps would succeed in
building a new and larger army capable of defeating Hitler. And, in
fact, it didn't. A "deus ex machina" was required -- the United States
of America.

This time it's the United States of America that's being pushed into
the sea. Our own civilians may mount a heroic rescue from
disaster, and we'll be 100 percent on board with that. But there are
no guarantees. And it would still be much much better if no rescue were
required, no Battle of Britain, no Twelve O'Clock High, no D-Day, and
no Battle of the Bulge to undo the harm of this one dastardly
Blitzkrieg offensive.

And dare I point out that we have nowhere to turn but our own citizenry
for rescue? There will be no "deus ex machina" to transform our patriotic sacrifices into final
victory the way we did for the Brits.

I understand his position. But I disagree. Despite what happened last
night, this bill still has
not passed. Therefore, let us keep fighting.

UPDATE 2.
CK MacLeod has responded
to my response. That he materially
misrepresents my response I won't bother with. He continues to believe
that good conservative intentions can undo a bad bill en route to
electoral and constitutional checkmate. That's the only
point I'll deal with now. Here's what Sarah
Palin is saying, and here's what she basing
it on.

It's called booby-trapping the future. The Democrats are very very good
at it. We still need to block this bill, whether it improves GOP
prospects in
2010 or not. This isn't political calculus. It's simple arithmetic.
Good news? It might still be possible. Would I rather have castles
in air or a chance
or a realizable hope?
You tell me.

. Gosh. We awarded this for the first time back in July
2004. At the time, we explained, "We don't give it out often. It
goes only to those who write pieces that need no elaboration or
injections of attitude to make their point. What we do in such cases is
simply reprint the the entire article, with no more than a brief
acknowledgment of one or two ways that they have earned our
admiration." Today we're pleased to honor, gulp, a Brit (!) who isn't
afraid to tell the truth about the ludicrous Copenhaaaagen summit.
Herewith, the words of Mr. Gerald
Warner:

Copenhagen
climate summit: 'most important paper
in the world' is a glorified UN press release

When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a
third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with
which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more
phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants
has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just
keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?

No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day,
change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a
single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to
interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see,
whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed
openly.

After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive
director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important
piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all
intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a
try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer
in a position to pick and choose their tactics.

But boy! Was this crass, or what? The apocalyptic document revealing
that even if the Western leaders hand over all the climate Danegeld
demanded of them, appropriately at the venue of Copenhagen, the earth
will still fry on a 3C temperature rise is the latest transparent scare
tactic to extort more cash from taxpayers. The danger of this ploy, of
course, is that people might say “If we are going to be chargrilled
anyway, what is the point of handing over billions – better to get some
serious conspicuous consumption in before the ski slopes turn into
saunas.”

This “single most important piece of paper in the world” comes,
presumably, from an authoritative and totally neutral source? Yes, of
course. It’s from the – er – UN Framework Committee on Climate Change
that is – er – running the Danegeld Summit. Some people might be
small-minded enough to suggest this paper has as much authority as a
“leaked” document from Number 10 revealing that life would be hell
under the Tories.

This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the
landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The
pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and
Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway
engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it
all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat
Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be
seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge
punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a
man who is really worried about the planet’s future.

If there were not $45 trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake,
this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of
buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon
bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft
that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been
so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though:
some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the
smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen.

Kewl. His prize? An exemption from some of the worst things we've said
about Brits
over the years. Sorry it couldn't have been cash. Like most subjects of
western socialist plutocracies, we don't have any. [Hint, hint]

. I knew about John Stossel and his long
history as a mote in the eye of ABC News. Mrs. CP didn't. Now he has
this new show on the Fox Business Network (Thursdays at 8 pm), and I
expected her to be impressed. She wasn't. Last night, he did this
health care thing with the CEO of Whole Foods, who got into so much
trouble by proposing that his own company's health plan was better than
the federal healthcare bill. I don't think Mrs. CP actually objected to
what he was doing by having a studio audience some of whom objected to
what he was proposing. I think she was objecting to the fact that
Stossel really is a journalist. One earnest longhair in his audience
who objected to a non-government approach actually whined about having to pay (Excuse
me -- get a bill for) his own money for a finger injury costing $500--
as if the government owed him
treatment for free. And Stossel let him make the argument without
rebuke.

What Mrs. CP wanted -- what I
wanted -- was Stossel to tell the whiner, "You're a joke. We don't owe you
anything." But he didn't. He's not O'Reilly. He's a journalist.

What I was struck by. He obviously salted his in-studio audience with
people who want the government to take care of them. The camera
lingered on them throughout, arms folded, cross little faces, sooo
unhappy about the mere mention of capitalism, even as the Whole Foods
CEO explained how his company's health program worked and multiple
hourly paid employees expressed their happiness with their company
health plan. What was clear was that nothing could ever dent the
dissenters' view that only the government was competent to make
anything better for everyone.

Which made me think -- frankly -- of our schools. For example, there
was a Stossel guest, a woman, who tried to explain the value and
productivity of profits. She convinced no one. She sounded like a PR
agent. Which reminded me that kids in our schools today learn far more
about media spin and Global Warming and the sins of America than they
ever learn about basic economics. How do you teach the ineluctable fact
that profits are the source of innovation, reinvestment, and new,
cheaper goods and services to people who have been propagandized by NEA
schoolteachers to believe that they're owed everything in life by just
showing up? And when that's all
they learn, you get something like this (maybe a stand-in for Stossel's
grumpy socialists...)

I mean, how dulled to basic reasoning do you have to be to hear about a
completely successful program and see no possibility of good in it.
Because the government is automatically better. And how obtuse do you
have to be never to have heard a story like this and wondered... just
wondered... that stuff like this might be true...